Iron Coder 7 under way, now with new twists

Iron Coder 7 is under way?now with more spiffyness!

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The Iron Coder contest started in 2006 as a small competition among Mac developers—a small amount of time (generally a weekend), an API, and a theme were given to devs and the results were voted upon by the masses. In the early days, the winner received the honor of choosing the next contest's API and theme, but since then people have stepped up and begun donating prizes to the competition.

The entries generally haven't been something the common user would enjoy, but instead something other developers and perhaps hardcore enthusiasts could marvel over. Past entrants, such as Tom Harrington (Atomic Bird), have later fleshed out their code to make a useful piece of software, however.

Iron Coder 7 is now under way, and it has a few twists from what the contest has traditionally offered. First off is the time frame. What has generally been a weekend-long event has been expanded to nine full days of coding. According to Jonathan Wight (IC 7's theme and API picker as well as official tie-breaker), the contest was extended to allow more coders an opportunity to get involved. The second twist is that, this time around, there is an 8GB iPod touch (donated by Brain Murmurs) up for grabs. That brings us to the third twist: voting will be done over Twitter, and only those developers who sent in code will be able to vote (self votes will be excluded).

For those of you interested this time around, the API is Core Animation—also called LayerKit (unofficially) on the iPhone—and the theme is "retro." I really like the theme, personally, and can't wait to take a look at what is produced with the extra time. Word on the street is that there are even some developers involved who might remember the days before OS X.

Iron Coder continues to evolve, becoming bigger as each iteration of the contest passes. Last year, the developers got together and raised $10,000 for the Child's Play charity. If you are interested in helping out with Iron Coder in the future, whether it be through prize donations or some other means, feel free to contact Jonathan Wight.

We will make sure we update you with the winner and all the cool code once the contest is finished.